Been trying to figure out the whole Wikileaks thing – not the good or bad of it so much as why it’s allowed to happen. When someone is allowed to embarrass a president and powerful country, there must be a reason all the powers involved have been either limited or released.

Glenn Reynold’s comments in the above link come the closest to explaining things:

If I were more suspicious, I would say that this is someone’s effort — perhaps someone burned by leaks in the past Administration — to teach the career bureaucrats who were behind those leaks that leaking may be a bad thing, and that a world in which any statement may be leaked to the press is not a world that’s good for them.

That riff is a crowd-pleaser because everyone knows that the entire apparatus of the security line is a national homage to political correctness. Nowhere do more people meekly acquiesce to more useless inconvenience and needless indignity for less purpose. Wizened seniors strain to untie their shoes; beltless salesmen struggle comically to hold up their pants; 3-year-olds scream while being searched insanely for explosives – when everyone, everyone, knows that none of these people is a threat to anyone.

And another…

We pretend that we go through this nonsense as a small price paid to ensure the safety of air travel. Rubbish. This has nothing to do with safety – 95 percent of these inspections, searches, shoe removals and pat-downs are ridiculously unnecessary. The only reason we continue to do this is that people are too cowed to even question the absurd taboo against profiling – when the profile of the airline attacker is narrow, concrete, uniquely definable and universally known. So instead of seeking out terrorists, we seek out tubes of gel in stroller pouches.

As the Journal points out, a piece of legislation called the STOCK Act proposes to bar members of Congress from trading securities based on nonpublic information they obtain. The bill so far has languished.

“Is it really surprising that this has gotten stuck?” Bainbridge said in an interview. “Until there is a very big scandal, it’s one of those classic good government reforms that will go nowhere.”